On account of these considerations, I have bracketed in my translation such part of the epilogues as seemed to me later interpolations. Yet I did not think it advisable to omit them. They are not without importance in themselves. They allow us an insight into the interior of the monasteries and to witness the monks preparing for preaching. Moreover, some of them contain precious information about holy texts of the Northern Buddhists, which are either lost or have not yet been discovered. In the epilogue of VIII there is even a textual quotation; likewise in that of XXX, where we find the words spoken by the Lord at the time of his Complete Extinction. As to XI, see my note on that epilogue. In XII and XXI similar sayings of holy books are hinted at.
Concerning the person of the author and his time, nothing certain is known. That he was called Ârya Sûra is told in the manuscripts, and is corroborated by Chinese tradition; the Chinese translation of the Gâtakamâlâ, made between 960 and 1127 A.D., bears Ârya Sûra on its title as the author's name (see Bunyiu Nanjio's Catalogue, No. 1312). Tibetan tradition, too, knows Sûra as a famous teacher, and as the author of our collection of stories. Târanâtha identifies him with Asvaghosha, and adds many more names by which the same great man should be known. It is, however, impossible that two works so entirely different in style and spirit as the Buddhakarita and the Gâtakamâlâ should be ascribed to one and the same author.
As to his time, Dr. d'Oldenburg observes that the terminus ante quem is the end of the 7th century A.D., since it seems that the Chinese traveller I-tsing speaks of our 'Garland of Birth-stories.' If No. 1349 of Bunyiu Nanjio's Catalogue of the Chinese Tripitaka, being a Sûtra on the fruits of Karma briefly explained by Ârya Sûra, is written by our author—and there seems to be no reasonable objection to this—Sûra must have lived before 434 A.D., when the latter work is said to have been translated into Chinese. This conclusion is supported by the purity and elegance of the language, which necessarily point to a period of a high standard of literary taste and a flourishing state of letters. Prof. Kern was induced by this reason to place Sûra approximately in the century of Kâlidâsa and Varâhamihira, but equally favourable circumstances may be supposed to have existed a couple of centuries earlier. I think, however, he is posterior to the author of the Buddhakarita. For other questions concerning the Gâtakamâlâ, which it would be too long to dwell upon here, I refer to Prof. Kern's preface and d'Oldenburg in Journ. Roy. As. Soc. 1893, pp. 306-309.
Târanâtha, the historian of Tibetan Buddhism, has preserved a legend which shows the high esteem in which the Gâtakamâlâ stands with the followers of the Buddha's Law. 'Pondering on the Bodhisattva's gift of his own body to the tigress, he [viz. Sûra] thought he could do the same, as it was not so very difficult. Once he, as in the tale, saw a tigress followed by her young, near starvation; at first he could not resolve on the self-sacrifice, but, calling forth a stronger faith in the Buddha, and writing with his own blood a prayer of seventy Slokas, he first gave the tigers his blood to drink, and, when their bodies had taken a little force, offered himself[21].' In this legend I recognise the sediment, so to speak, of the stream of emotion caused by the stimulating eloquence of that gifted Mahâyânist preacher on the minds of his co-religionists. Any one who could compose discourses such as these must have been capable of himself performing the extraordinary exploits of a Bodhisattva. In fact, something of the religious enthusiasm of those ancient apostles of the Mahâyâna who brought the Saddharma to China and Tibet pervades the work of Sûra, and it is not difficult to understand that in the memory of posterity he should have been represented as a saint who professed the ethics of his religion, non disputandi causa, as Cicero says of Cato, ut magna pars, sed ita vivendi.
It was no easy task to translate a work of so refined a composition, still less because there is no help to be had from any commentary. The Sanskrit text has none, and the Chinese commentary mentioned by Bunyiu Nanjio is not translated. Repeated and careful study of the original has led me to change a few passages of the translation I formerly published in the Bijdragen voor Taal-Land-en Volkenkunde van Ned. Indië, vols. viii and x of the fifth 'Volgreeks.' Moreover, I have adapted this, which may almost be styled a second edition, to the wants and the arrangements of the 'Sacred Books of the East.'
J. S. Speyer.
Groningen, April 16, 1895.
GÂTAKAMÂLÂ
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